


death holds out its hand (you refuse to shake)

by xandrillia



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Immortality, Bc spoilers, F/F, Immortals, Major character death - Freeform, Minor Character Death, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Catra (She-Ra), Pirates, Slow Burn, and just to be safe, except part of chapter 1, no beta we die like the yearning lesbians we are, old guard rules which means they can die but keep coming back, so i unfortunately have to tag, thanks [redacted], the rest is between me and god, they make it to space eventually i promise
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-16
Updated: 2021-01-16
Packaged: 2021-03-13 17:21:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28781895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xandrillia/pseuds/xandrillia
Summary: “Dawn’s on its way,” the woman says lightly. “Coming or going?”“Going,” Catra responds. The woman’s eyes darken.“It’s one word, Catra. You’re seriously going to sit here and rot for your pride?”Catra nods, resolute. It doesn’t matter what this woman says— she has seen it time and time again, death hooking its claws into countless souls, dragging them to a world she has yet to see. “Death comes for us all.”The woman hums agreement. “Eventually, yes. In the meantime—" she pauses, eyes sliding over Catra.“Come what will.”or: catra may be immortal, but this woman will be the death of her.
Relationships: Adora & Catra (She-Ra), Adora/Catra (She-Ra), Bow & Glimmer (She-Ra), Bow/Glimmer (She-Ra)
Comments: 28
Kudos: 89





	death holds out its hand (you refuse to shake)

**Author's Note:**

> !! hello! full disclosure etc: this fic does _not_ need to be read all at once. there are 7 parts to the first chapter (they’re labeled w i/ii/etc) so you can break it up easily if you want and just search what marker you’re at to find your spot. honestly i would be kinda surprised if anyone read it all at once lol
> 
> massive shoutout to anyonesaunt for letting me ramble incessantly at her and convincing me to keep this dramatic :) also if you’re on my twt sorry ive been vaguing this for like 3 months. i cannot be stopped
> 
> apologies in advance for the ghastly amount of em dashes <3
> 
> (mature for violence, content warning for that & death)

_i._

Catra is twenty two when she realizes she can’t die.

Well— it’s not that she can’t die, per se.

She just keeps coming back.

When she was young, she’d always known something was different about her. Her resilience, determination, the way she sprung to meet any challenge without fear, no matter how risky the odds. She was stronger than she had any right to be, as starved as she was on the unforgiving sea.

Different.

Others noticed, too.

The first time they dared her, it was mild. The second held more bite. The third, the fifth, the tenth, hundredth— _those_ dares— they weren’t for the faint of heart. Always more dangerous, ever more daring than the last. With each, Catra stepped to the challenge. Not once did she falter. Not once did she back down.

She won.

Every

single

time.

 _Nine lives,_ her crew whispered when she finished the fight against all odds, knives flashing like lightning, eyes dull with pain.

 _Eight,_ they said, voices echoed by the sharp _crack_ of bones, _pop_ of joints, pain burning like tight wires under her skin.

 _Seven._ Falling, soaring, gliding, plummeting to the earth only to rise again moments later, albeit on momentarily unsteady feet.

 _Six._ Light gracing the edge of an enemy’s blade, twice as sharp as their skill and every bit as painful.

 _Five._ Betrayal, the pain of her loss greater than any relief death could grant her, should it answer her call.

 _Four._ Illness slithering through the veins of everyone she knew, her own breaths even and clear, the guilt a plague in itself.

 _Three._ A second occurrence: trust; distrust. She learned to hold her cards close to her chest. Her secrets fall from no lips but her own.

 _Two._ Blue eyes, blonde hair, and blood on her teeth: a woman sharper than Catra knew how to handle.

 _One._ The ocean in her lungs, sky split monochrome above her. Thunder rolling through the sea, through her, waves rushing overhead. Electricity burning white lines past her fingertips. Crashing waves, crushing pressure, and crowded mind, fear only for what she’d missed.

Nine lives.

Nine losses.

Her time is up.

  
  


_ii._

_“Fuck.”_

Catra lurches forward with a gasp, hands clawing at her chest. Salt burns like acid in her throat, a trail of fire threading through her lungs as she gasps for breath. She pushes herself to her hands and knees in the surf, and, catching sight of the woman next to her, scrambles back to put as much distance between them as possible.

“You— you pulled me over, you _bastard,_ what the—" she chokes on her words, head spinning. The ground under her hands blurs, rising nausea in her stomach helped by swirling waves and shifting sand. The woman watches with wide eyes as Catra tries to regather herself. After a moment, the burning in her stomach abates.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” she manages, finally, voice thick with— fear? exhaustion? anger?— she doesn’t know which. The woman— Mara, she’d called herself, although Catra knows now the name was a lie— sits back on her heels, looking far more concerned than she has any right to be. Her hand hovers between them like she wants to bridge the distance but doesn’t know how. After a moment’s hesitation she pulls back, gaze flicking over Catra. Her eyes match the bright sky above— _too_ bright, blue and clear and not a cloud in the sky to tell of the storm they’d just barely survived. It had been midday when they’d fallen, though a thick layer of clouds had mimicked the deepest night Catra had ever seen. This is wrong.

“Are you okay?” the woman asks. The faux worry in her voice grates at Catra, buries under her skin, salt in the wound given that she was the reason they were ever in danger in the first place. Catra and her crew— her _crew,_ who wouldn’t have made it off the ship. Catra tries to reply but finds she can’t, panic and confusion crawling up her throat and drowning out any protests she might have to offer. She gasps for breath, hand pressed over her chest, expecting to see blood spilling into the sea from the gaping wound her heart bears.

“They’re dead,” Catra says softly. The world stills, the steady waves pausing in their pulsing tide. Her heartbeat pounds in her ears, and even the wind hesitates a moment in consideration of her words. The woman catches her breath.

“They’re dead, and it’s your fault,” she repeats.

“No,” she says, shaking her head. “It didn’t go down, I saw it—"

“They didn’t make it.”

 _“Catra.”_ The woman leans forward, anger in her words. It’s the same tone she’d used before pulling Catra overboard, abandoning the helm and the people she’d sworn to protect.

“The ship didn’t go down. I saw it.”

Catra drags her gaze from the surf beneath her hands to the woman, the words slow to process in her mind. She absently realizes she’s shaking, hands closed into fists over her heart and in the sand beneath the waves, gaze empty.

“Get away from me,” she whispers. She pushes herself to her feet, stumbling. Waves rolling over her ankles ground her, pulling her back to herself. She shakes away her panic and swallows her fear, making way for the steady confidence that should sit in its place.

“Wait,” the woman says, hesitant. She holds up a hand between them like she wants to reach for Catra, panicked wide eyes searching Catra’s face. Catra shakes her head and takes a step back, telling herself it’s not retreat but well-placed caution.

“You have questions,” the woman says, seeing Catra closing herself off. It’s true— why would she endanger them all and directly risk Catra’s life only to pull her to shore? Why the false name? Why fourteen degrees? Who was the friend, and why had she lied? Why had Catra _trusted_ her? She would rather hand over her best knives than betray her curiosity, though, so she shakes her head and cheats another step back, eyes flicking to the stretch of land over the woman’s shoulder.

The beach is barren, a jagged coastline coated by a fine layer of gritty sand, the barest strip of beach between water and cliffs, white face marred by dark stains where high tide wears away its base. Unclimbable and uninhabited, but there must be something behind Catra that she can escape to. Despite having just barely evaded her long overdue death, she bets she can outrun the other woman if she needs to.

“I don’t,” she responds distractedly, and this woman— this _damned_ woman, the one Catra had almost begun to fall for, the one she never told a single truth to but showed herself anyway, walking the line between secrets and stories, searching for answers and receiving only half-hidden lies and exaggerations in return, the tiniest glimpse of who she could be that only served to make Catra want to know more, always more— she looks at Catra and _laughs._ Actually snorts and immediately tries to cover up the slip, but the mask is gone and Catra knows what lies underneath.

“Okay,” the woman says a moment later, composed once again. “Sure. But do you believe me?”

“What?”

“Do you believe me,” she repeats, raising an eyebrow. It takes a moment for the words to click. She flicks her hair over her shoulder, the normally golden strands dark with water. She remains unminding of the surf crashing around her hips, of the exhaustion that must wear in her bones the same way it does Catra’s, attention only for her.

"I—" Catra freezes. She remembers falling, of course, the woman tipping them overboard, arm across her throat and open air around them, the barrage of rain and seawater stilled in her momentary flight. The sea rushing in her ears, desperate panic and the clear knowledge that all her risks had caught up to her. She remembers wishing for a goodbye, as much as she hated them, and knowing she would never get them. The bitter taste of knowing she’d gone down without a fight, and the close pain of betrayal. Hope, shattered to pieces. Pride, left in the dust.

What she’s only beginning to recall is the argument that preceded it.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Catra says, because this is easier. This is kinder.

“You do.”

“I don’t,” she says, voice cracking, even as the pieces of their fight click into place. Those angry words, the fierce strength. The clear proposal of something she’d fought against for years, something she would never speak, feared to dream. The woman raises an eyebrow, and there it is— that _look,_ the one Catra had glimpsed before the fall, studying Catra with an intensity that spoke to years between them instead of only weeks and a handful of days like spare coin. It’s that look that has Catra stepping back, bringing her hand to her hip in search of her blades and finding none. It’s that look that reminds Catra that she’s far, _far,_ out of her depth.

Catra takes another step back. The sand and water swirling over the woman’s knees should slow her down a moment, enough for Catra to get out of close range and the hell away from her. Then she’s free— from the shadows in her eyes, the pain of this conversation, and the questions she’s never had the courage to ask herself. The woman gestures to her with growing agitation, and Catra realizes dimly she’s been speaking still. She shakes herself back to the conversation.

"—Catra, why can’t you see it?”

“Why would I believe you?” she shouts. Her voice comes out too loud, shocking her and the woman both into momentary silence. She charges past it, trying to justify the outburst as anything other than _scared._

_“You_ are the last person I’d ever trust,” Catra hisses. _“You_ are the reason I almost died. You lied and put us at risk and they paid the fucking price for it, so you need to get the hell out of my sight before I do something I won’t regret.”

“I’m sorry,” she says earnestly. “I didn’t mean for us to get caught in the storm. We were supposed to meet a friend, he’s—" she cuts off, embarrassed. “He’s a lot better at this than I am.”

“Better at what?”

She flutters her hands noncommittally. “New people, I guess? Answers?”

Catra clenches her jaw. She wants to run and never look back, but honestly? Catra _does_ want to know what this woman had been talking about. Anyone else would call her stories madness, but Catra sees more than that in her words.

“What do you want to know?” she asks, open and honest and unlike anything she’s ever been to Catra before.

Catra stares at her, too proud to reply and too stubborn to back down. Throughout endless shifts on the ship, countless curt conversations and cut words, Catra learned next to nothing about the woman standing before her now. It had been a game between them, for one to draw answers out of the other without revealing of her own. The temptation of knowledge is just strong enough to bring the woman back into her line of sight. She clenches her jaw, a thousand questions within her reach, and settles on the only one she can’t explain for herself.

“Why me?”

“You?”

Catra nods.

“Because you’re like me,” she says honestly. “Immortal,” she lies.

Whatever strand of hope Catra had been holding onto falls away. Her face darkens and she turns away, old walls falling back into place. The woman sees it, scrambles to undo it.

“No— Catra, wait—"

“I’m done.”

The woman grabs her arm, having run to catch up to her. “Catra—"

Catra whirls on her, hands in fists at her sides, anger radiating off of her in waves, and the woman has the sense to let go. “Leave. Me. _Alone._ I don’t want this— I didn’t ask for this, and you don’t get to tell me who I am,” she says, words spilling out of her like a broken dam. “You can never tell me who I— what I’m supposed to be, and I don’t know why you thought I was a part of this, or whatever, but I’m not a part of it.” She laughs bitterly, running her hands through her hair and turning to walk away.

“Catra—"

“Thanks for trying to tell me, because I can honestly see you’re upset about it, but you’ve got the wrong person. “I’m not who you’re looking for.”

The woman scrambles to follow, slipping in the loose sand, clearly unaccustomed to the water in the same way she was aboard the ship. “I can prove it to you.”

“Oh, yeah? How, by trying to kill me again?”

“Tell me my name,” she says.

Catra stops. She turns to the woman, silhouetted by the sun reflecting off the water behind her, something of a halo surrounding her where Catra personally knows that she deserves far less. Catra flexes her hand. She hesitates, calculates, and takes a risk. Call it a leap of faith, whatever. She makes the choice on her own terms.

“Why?”

The woman studies Catra, chewing her lip for a moment before she speaks. “It’s how we find each other,” she says slowly. “Other immortals. We see glimpses, get memories. Parts of their lives in place of where yours should be.”

Catra frowns but doesn’t stop her. The woman takes her silence for approval and rambles on, gesturing brightly.

“You know me, right? And I you. I’ve been looking for you— and my friend, he has too— trying to piece everything together. You were harder to find than I expected,” she says with a quiet laugh. “But you being well-known helped! And it’s okay— I know you know me, too, like a shattered memory.”

“I don’t,” Catra says, now her turn to lie. She’d known the woman from the moment she first set foot on her ship, though she hadn’t placed the feeling until later. She heard her laugh in a bustling market, saw her ponytail disappearing around a corner just out of reach. Seen her eyes in the thieves scouring her ship, in the blue above her every day, and recognized the woman’s energy in her own heart.

“You’re lying,” she whispers.

“C’mon, Catra. You know me, just say it. You know it’s true.”

“I don’t need to prove myself to you,” she says dully. Scorpia used to say those words to her, a lifetime ago when they owed too much to too many.

“To yourself, not me.”

“I already know who I am.”

“Please, just one word.”

Catra licks her lips. “Mara.”

The woman steps back, tension falling from her shoulders. She laughs in disbelief. “Seriously?”

She nods. “I’m leaving.” With that she turns again, marching away from the woman. She pushes her hair out of her face and squints at the horizon, surprised to feel the ache in her bones loosening with every step. There’s a shuffling sound behind her as the woman slips over sand to follow Catra. She tenses but continues her steady pace along the beach, a curving bay that stretches on for another mile or two. A small town sits nestled in the rocks cliffs before her, docks reaching out into the sea from its base, grimy and dark. Small pastel houses overlook the comings and goings of a few small boats with watchful eyes, few figures lining the docks.

“You can’t go there— they’ll catch you,” the woman warns. She keeps pace next to Catra, far enough that Catra doubts she wouldn’t see an attack coming. She shakes her head, eyes on the coastal town. Catra recognizes the potential signs of danger— the lack of any real stores, only inns and restaurants facing the docks and sea, meaning cargo ships and high security. The woman is right.

“I can take care of myself,” Catra says anyway.

“For piracy,” she continues.

“I didn’t ask. I don’t even _know_ you,” she says, and the words sting, though they’re true.

The woman watches her go, unimpressed and possibly slightly amused.

“Tell me my name,” she calls. It’s a challenge, a dare, something far deeper than it seems.

_Not once did she falter._

“Us immortals— we’re destined to find each other. We _know_ each other,” she reasons, apathy turning to anger. Her eyes are bright, too bright, fevered with illusion and time. “Tell me. Prove you’re one of us.”

“No.”

“Catra.”

_Not once did she back down._

There’s something new in everything, she supposes. But not now. Not today.

“I won’t.”

The woman raises an eyebrow. “Alright.”

Catra will not consign herself to this fate.

“Trust your luck,” the woman dares.

Catra considers her: fire and fear and too-sharp _everything,_ made to cut and hurt and bleed. She’s too much; she’s a risk.

Catra weighs her choices, and it’s never been a competition, has it?

Truth, or lies.

Live, or die.

She runs.

_iii._

**Five weeks ago**

The first time Catra met Adora, it wasn’t an accident.

“What can you do for us?” Catra asked, heels kicking lazily against the ship’s rail. She surveyed the woman before her, one of the few people who had heard she was looking for crew.

“Navigate and any labor you need,” she replied without hesitation. Catra tilted her head, considering. They’d lost a few crew to shore on their last leave, and while she wouldn’t normally pull strangers from an unnamed port, she needed to make up for lost space. The woman did look suited to the job, although she had the sharp air of someone who had lived their entire life on land. A few weeks at sea and her edges would start to blur, eroded by wind and sea. With a jolt, Catra realized she’d already accepted the woman as part of her crew.

“I’ve already got a navigator,” Catra replied, because others were watching and she couldn’t give in that easily when they had each for for their position aboard her ship.

“Can yours work without a compass?”

Catra shook her head. “That’s irrelevant.”

“Why?”

She paused. One of the many downfalls of spending her childhood on land with no knowledge of the sea meant that her navigation wasn’t exactly the _best_ there was. They’d been in shit positions before, too, including burning ships and even marooned, once, and having someone who knew the trade better than she did would be a good safety net. Not that Catra needed insurance, but it would be nice not to do the charts entirely on her own. She crossed her arms.

“Alright,” she decided, avoiding the question. “What’s your name?”

The woman hesitated a moment before she spoke, weighing the name on her tongue. It was a mistake neither had expected, the first crack in the self-assured facade she’d built up since her first encounter with Catra the day before, a brief conversation of twenty words or less. It piqued Catra’s interest.

“Mara,” the woman said, finally. Something prickled under Catra’s skin, whispering something she couldn’t name yet. She considered it. She pocketed it, and nodded, once.

“Welcome aboard.”

She smiled.

She kept her distance the first few days, which was fine by Catra. There were things to do and places to go, and both had their hands full. Catra didn’t like accepting crew she doesn’t know at least by recommendation or as a friend of a friend, either, although she understood the necessity. They’d been teetering on the edge of a skeleton crew for the last few weeks after a group set down in Erelandia without intent to return, and it had been wearing heavily on those who remained. Luckily, the woman and two others they’d picked up had taken their fair share of the work.

After a few days, the curiosity Catra had hushed started speaking louder. Catra was good with faces, and she knew she’d never seen Mara’s before. Still, there was something familiar about her. A memory she should have recalled, despite everything in Catra rebelling at the idea.

Mara.

The name wasn’t hers. That’s what set her off, the quiet realization one night while laying the charts elbow to elbow with the stranger. _She’s just running from something,_ Catra told herself, a wary eye on the woman. She pushed her hair out of her face, golden strands falling in waves past her shoulders, stormy eyes focused on the path mapped before her. Catra watched her work a moment longer before shaking her head. From there, Catra’s interest only grew.

“She’s a runner,” her first mate, Scorpia, had commented that day on the deck, interviewing potential crew. Catra had laughed and agreed.

Two weeks later, Scorpia shrugged off a lax comment from Catra.

“She’s kind,” she replied. Scorpia might stretch compliments a little further than they deserved with others, but not with Catra, and not about her crew. Catra raised an eyebrow, wondering why she’d only ever gotten a few words out of the woman at a time where she was apparently so open with everyone else aboard.

Catra kept a mental list of the strikes against the woman, each something _wrong_ about her in some unnamed fashion. Her name— a lie. She was running from something. She avoided Catra. Her charts were more orderly than any she’d seen in a printed book, and Scorpia claimed the woman knew the name of every star sprinkled across the sky they sailed beneath. Despite what she’d thought, the woman seemed at home on the ocean and often traded menial tasks for niche ones, impressive on their own but even more so that she excelled in each.

She liked the puzzle, but Catra needed more to work with. One night, she let her curiosity get the better of her.

“Who are you?” she asked. Catra stood in the doorway to the tiny room the woman had to herself, arms crossed. She hadn’t seen Catra approach, caught up in the book in her hands, and looked momentarily disoriented at her appearance. After a moment struggling for an answer, she set down her book.

“Find out yourself,” she responded. Her tone held banter where her words were all challenge. Catra hadn’t known how to respond, so she didn’t. Another week, and more of the same. The woman was by then friends with everyone aboard, somehow finding common ground with both Scorpia and the hardest of the crew. Even Scorpia hadn’t managed such genuine relationships with the others (not for lack of trying). Through it all, she avoided Catra.

“Where are you going?” Catra asked one night, hands on the helm and eyes on the horizon. Stars glittered above them, an infinite net of jewels she only knew how to read after years of practice and study. Catra had grown used to fighting them for their answers, but it was second nature to the woman, like she only needed to ask politely for directions and they’d part the night sky to show her the path.

The woman leaned against the side of the ship, face turned to the sea like she couldn’t get enough of it, despite living on the waves for night and day as long as Catra had known her.

“Dunno. My mom said I should follow my heart,” she said with a teasing smile. “Wherever that leads, I suppose.” She closed her eyes, hair whipping around her face in the wind, unminding of the cool sting of seawater in the air. Starlight sparkled silver over the choppy waves, turning blonde to platinum and her to a statue of marble under their light.

“How long have you been following it?”

The woman turned. Her smile shifted to something personal, letting Catra closer than she would have expected.

“Too long to find any real answers.” Catra nodded, and that was the end.

One night, the woman asked if Catra was alone.

“No,” she responded, confused. “You’re here.”

“Not like that,” she pressed. “Home, or family. Is there anyone waiting for you?”

Catra frowned. That wasn’t the point of them, to ask and expect. She turned away, busy preparing for her watch in the crow’s nest. It wasn’t a position captains usually took, but she found the wind’s company comforting, and it was the only real place to get any quiet on the ship.

“Why would I tell you?” she asked. The woman shrugged, looking honestly confused.

“I thought we were friends.”

Catra laughed, sharp and bright. “You’ve been a part of this crew three weeks and spoken with me twice, each a conversion which I barely followed due to your rambling. That’s not friendship.”

“Three.”

“What?”

“We’ve spoken three times,” the woman clarified. Her insistent eyes burned bright on Catra, clearly searching for something.

“It doesn’t matter,” Catra said, pulling a bag over her shoulder as first watch descended the rigging. Catra could have sworn the woman muttered _it does_ before she left, but pretended she didn’t.

The game started a week later.

“Where are you from?” the woman asked innocently. She didn’t look up from the map, tracing a line with her finger over the course they’d taken in the last day. Lamps swayed lazily overhead, the tiny map room barely enough to lay the maps and squeeze around the table to mark their progress. It was Catra’s second home aboard the ship, and though she had expected to hate sharing the space, she didn’t mind the company.

“South of here,” she says. It’s a ridiculous answer, as they’re far north in the Atlantic, meaning the only land north of them is glacial and slow. “You?”

“Also south.”

Catra nodded, playing along. The game was simple: to figure out the other. They’d fallen into a rhythm of trying to pick the other apart without giving away anything themselves, any question free game, though neither was required to answer. Catra wanted to know exactly _who_ this woman was, where she was running from, and what she was doing aboard her ship, and intended to find out. If she had to give up some information herself to do so, she could manage with lies. Across the table, the woman nodded. She was clearly stalling for something, her side of the map already laid out in clean lines. She was efficient, but that meant she was distracting Catra from her own unfinished work.

“Any ghost stories?” she asked suddenly. It was a stupidly endearing question, eager and bright and obviously only asked because the woman didn’t want to leave. Catra gritted her teeth and added a dark mark to the map.

“Only on land.”

“Why? What, are you superstitious?” she asked with a smile. Giving up on any pretense of work, she propped her chin in her hand, drumming her fingers on the table. Catra bristled.

“I’m a _pirate,_ sunshine. We’re stuck in our ways.”

“You don’t seem one for tradition,” she pointed out. “Then again, this isn’t much of a traditional life.”

“Pirates have existed as long as there have been boats.” Catra set down her work with a _snap._ “Is that all you wanted, or are you looking for more work?”

“A little curiosity never hurt anyone,” she protested.

“ _I_ might.” Catra pointed to the door. “Out.”

“Really.”

She raised an eyebrow. Rolling her eyes— which Catra didn’t call her on, because she wasn’t a shitty captain— the woman stood with a sigh. Pausing at the door, she cast a glance to Catra.

“Do you—”

_“Out.”_

She left.

That was the beginning. Back and forth, asking and expecting nothing, digging for clues in the most abstract answers. Catra hated not knowing, but letting the woman pass by without at least attempting to look for answers was worse than waiting.

Eventually they phased through the tedious questions of _who are you, where are you from, what are you doing here,_ to the interesting ones. Catra had to pause before these ones, wonder what the woman was looking for. The game had quickly become her favorite pastime aboard the ship, distracting her when she knew she couldn’t afford it. Her curiosity trailed behind her like an afterthought, slipping closer with every passing minute. She let it wear at her until it was all she could think about. If Scorpia noticed, she didn’t ask, and Catra was grateful for not having to come up with an answer.

-

“Do you believe in the stories of the old spirits?” the woman asked. She and Catra sat at one of the ship’s few tables belowdecks, her having just woken for a shift, Catra finally finishing a long day. Catra swirled her drink, trying to focus through the warm buzz in her head. It had been a tiring day and she was feeling lenient, willing to let the woman slip through the cracks in her armor if she dared get close.

“Which ones?”

“Any of them,” the stranger said. “All of them.” Her eyes were clear, unblinking as she watched Catra. She took a drink.

“In a way,” Catra mused. “Even if they’re not real, they’ll always be with us. It’s our pasts that define us, isn’t it? As long as we remember, real or not, they’re with us.”

The woman’s eyes darkened. “Only their memory?”

“If you’re asking if I think they live still, you’ve had too much to drink,” she said, offering the woman a clear way out in a moment of charity.

“I’m asking whether you’d trust them.”

“Oh.”

They paused. Catra sat back in her chair. The woman watched her quietly, waiting for her response. Her question had a clear weight, although Catra didn’t know what answer she was searching for.

“I’d trust them to repeat,” she said, finally. “To repeat their lives from before, and their mistakes. Legends don’t learn, Mara. They only die.”

-

Five weeks later, Catra couldn’t take it.

“I want to know who you are.”

The woman jumped at Catra’s voice, book snapping shut. Books on the sea were a risk, but this one seemed fine, glittering gold letters emblazoned along the shabby spine, worn only by time. She sat up halfway, swinging awkwardly in one of the worn hammocks reserved for crew, surprise scrawled across her face. Taking in Catra in the doorway, arms crossed and mouth set in a firm scowl, she seemed almost sheepish. It wasn’t a good look on her.

“I may have lied,” she said, cautiously, “about a few things.”

Catra growled, one hand finding the knife at her hip. “A _few?”_ The woman followed her movement with wary eyes.

“I can explain.”

“You’d better.” Catra jerked her chin toward the stairs. She hoped it wouldn’t come to it, but Catra’s chances in a fight would be better with room to move; her speed wouldn’t be any help in such tight quarters. “On deck, ten minutes. Get your story in order or I’m leaving you on the next land we find.”

“Catra—”

“Get. It—” Catra stepped forward, one hand snapping out to close in the woman’s shirt. She pulled her forward, scowling. _“Together.”_

The woman nodded. Catra let her go and she slumped back, resigned to telling the truth, abashed at being caught.

“Okay,” she agreed.

Catra left. She took the steps to the main deck quickly. A dark storm burned on the horizon, bruised purple and navy matching her mood as she ran her hands over the cool knives on her belt, tucked into her boots, laid against her forearm. Her crew, ever imaginative, had taken to calling them her claws a few years ago, and the name had stuck. No matter where Catra travelled, whispers of whistling blades and silent deals preceded her, the reputation more protection than she herself could offer.

That was what surprised her about the woman— she knew Catra, knew the stories. Not because Catra had told her, but because everyone else already had. There were few names that stuck on the sea, hers being one among the rare few that carried any sort of weight. Deceiving Catra to come aboard her ship— it _had_ to have been intentional. There simply wasn’t another option. A risk, Catra supposed, but whose? Who would send one man to take down a threat as big as her and her reputation? She and her _crew?_

Catra shook her head, tearing herself out of the pattern she’d started to pace along the deck, boards below her creaking in time with pulsing waves beneath the hull. Crew bustled past her, sidestepping their captain without a second thought. Ten minutes to get her thoughts in order. Ten minutes to be ready to listen, ten minutes of anticipating a fight that might not come. She realized she was pacing again, and stilled her steps.

“Captain,” someone called over the _snap_ of sails against pre-storm winds and clattering footsteps, the steady thuds and low voices complaining of work getting done. She turned to the voice. A young man stood at the top of the stairs, gesturing for her to follow. “We have a problem.”

Three minutes later, the woman was the least of Catra’s problems.

The charts were wrong.

Catra checked them, and checked again. The kid did, too, hands shaking as he spread parchment over the worn wood. He bit his nails and shifted his weight when he finished his numbers. She couldn’t blame him.

“When did you notice?” she asked. The lamp overhead swayed erratically, urging on the slow dread building in her stomach. At this time in the afternoon they shouldn’t have needed it, but the sky outside the port windows darkened faster than Catra would have liked.

“I thought I misread them at noon, and just confirmed we were off course with this sighting,” he said, pointing to a small island marked in black ink. “It’s nearly fourteen degrees off course, and I can’t sight the distance right now.”

 _Fourteen degrees,_ Catra thought to herself, astonished. And done right before her, not a clue to alert her of the mistake. The _sabotage,_ because Catra didn’t fuck this up, and the woman’s work was too meticulous for it to be an accident.

“And…” the kid hesitated. “We’ll be in the shoals, now.”

Catra spread her hands over the maps. The storm outside— the one Scorpia had been so ostentatiously keeping an eye on, the one Catra hadn’t given a second thought to— was suddenly a danger that fell on Catra’s shoulders to avoid. She clenched her jaw, daring the woman to step through the door, knowing her blade would find home faster than the woman could speak another of her damned lies. For better or for worse, the room remained blessedly quiet, only fine paper crinkling softly under her fingertips.

“How long until we’re clear?” she asked.

“I’m not sure without our clear position, but maybe two hours? More?”

“Get everyone on deck. Lose any weight we can afford to.”

“Captain?”

She straightened, eyes clouding with an anger she hadn’t felt in a long time.

“We’ll have to outrun it.”

-

On deck, Scorpia reigned in chaos by the barest breadth. She shouted from the helm, planting her feet to hold the ship on its clear course out of the shoals and into the edges of the approaching storm. Waves pounded against the hull like a steady heartbeat in time with blustering gusts of warm wind, nearly tearing ropes free of crews’ hands and whipping Catra’s hair into her eyes. She squinted at the dark water behind them, dotted with their recent earnings, cast aside in favor of their survival.

“Scorpia,” she called, one hand braced on the railing. She gestured to her first mate. Scorpia tore her eyes from the horizon long enough to catch Catra’s message and nod grimly, jaw tightening.

“Be careful,” she warned. Catra nodded.

The woman was helping the crew, surprisingly enough. Catra joined her. They threw everything over that they didn’t need, keeping only food, water, and the barest irreplaceable essentials to lighten their load. Catra looked the woman in the eye as she dropped her book over the rail, gold lettering disappearing into frothing waves. The woman clenched her jaw and looked away.

“What did you do?” Catra asked. Saltwater stung her face in the sharp breeze. The woman glanced at Catra. She hesitated only a moment before pulling an unused coil of rope over one shoulder and turning to bring it below, out of water’s way where its excess weight wouldn’t drag them down. Anything counted at this point; Catra followed with more of the same.

“I didn’t mean to,” she started.

 _“Bullshit._ What the fuck did you do?”

“We were supposed to meet someone,” she said carefully, taking the stairs again. Catra followed. Abovedeck, thunder rolled across the water with the strength of a hundred canons, a sharp enough _crack_ reverberating in Catra’s chest for her to momentarily fear they’d lost one of the masts.

“You don’t—” Catra stepped back as a crate sailed past her head and into the water. “You don’t make the decisions.”

“I didn’t plan _this,_ Catra!” She flung her hand to the ocean around them, and for the first time, Catra saw fear in her eyes. “If that’s what you’re asking, you have it wrong. I didn’t— I _wouldn’t_ do this.” She shook her head, voice dropping to near a whisper. “I wouldn’t.” Lightning flickered from low clouds— close, too close— and the woman’s eyes widened, going to the sky behind Catra. Despite herself, she turned to look.

Rising out of the sea with all the grace of a fallen god, a tower of water swirled toward the heavens, pulled by gale-force winds twisting over themselves, haste to gather as much of the sea in its hands as possible. It was a good four kilometers away, maybe more, but there must have been land nearby to form such a monstrous waterspout so quickly, moving from land to sea in a flash.

 _One too many gambles,_ a voice whispered. Catra shook it away. This was a fight she would not lose. She darted across the ship to Scorpia, who had remained at the helm while they bared the ship.

“How far?” she asked. Light rain had begun to fall as they skirted the storm’s edges, its heart drawing nearer with each _tick_ of the watch in her pocket. She tied her hair out of her face with a bandanna and swapped positions.

“Twenty minutes?” Lennox will know,” Scorpia said. Worry flashed in her dark eyes. She gave Catra a terse smile and rushed to help secure belowdecks.

Catra looked to the clear horizon before them, almost painfully bright. They soared toward it, faster than they’d ever sailed, and lighter, too. Catra’s weight always fell differently on the ship’s deck when they flew, and then was no exception. She was lighter than air, soaring across the waves, practically flying.

Grounded to the ship, sealed to her fate, the wood beneath her feet a coffin nailed shut.

The winds grew stronger.

She tightened her grip. Saltwater stung her face, cold countering hot raindrops falling from above. Soon they would be a burden to see through, but for now served only as relief against thick heat. The stairs to the quarterdeck creaked and Catra should have been on guard or at least worried that the woman snuck up on her on her own ship, but she didn’t feel any of that. The danger of the storm fell to the back of her mind.

“What’s your name?” she asked. The woman stepped aside for someone to pass. For a moment, Catra wondered if she wouldn’t answer.

“Mara,” she said, and it was a lie. Catra’s anger from before had burned away. Fear remained, simple and true. The deck creaked under her feet. Clouds built on either side of the ship, inching forward, straining downward as if to touch the dark waves. She shook her head.

“No, it’s not.”

The woman’s eyes lit with hope. “No,” she agreed. “Care to tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

“My name.”

Catra scoffed. “If you’ve forgotten, I can’t help you.” Catra turned to her. The wind shifted, a cold burst of air from the upcoming front sliding like a knife through the humid front they’d been sailing through. Rain stung like ice against her face. She shivered. “I don’t know how you expect me to help you,” she repeated.

“You do,” the woman repeated, insistent.

“I don’t,” Catra said. The ship jolted under their feet and Catra cursed, holding the course steady. The woman held onto the rail, steadier than Catra, and she wondered in just how many ways she’d misjudged the stranger.

“Why did you do this?” she asked, voice unmasked and afraid. She tore her eyes from the sea.

“I didn’t mean to,” she replied immediately. “Please, it was—”

“No, not that,” Catra muttered. Her hands tightened on the helm. “Me. You lied to me.”

 _Fuck,_ she didn’t mean for it to sound so _personal._ Still, there wasn’t room in Catra’s mind to care about anything other than the woman’s answer, her reasoning, the motive behind drawing Catra so close only to rip her trust to shreds like it was nothing. Like _she_ was nothing, but she could afford to think like that.

“You wouldn’t have believed me.”

“Try me.”

The woman bit her lip. Catra waited, glancing over her shoulder. The waterspout had kept its distance, though torrential winds tore at her clothes even at such a distance. Crew staggered in the force of it, keeping low to the deck. Sails snapped where they were loose, stretched painfully tight across weakening beams where they weren’t.

“I have to tell you something,” the woman admitted, steadying herself on the ship’s rail.

“Get on with it, sunshine. We haven’t got much time left.”

She shook her head. The rain was falling faster, now, reducing the horizon to a smear of bright light.

“You really think we’ll die out here?” the woman called over the wind, sounding mildly curious instead of terrified as she should be. She frowned. “Nevermind. I was supposed to take you to someone— the friend I mentioned.”

“Just tell me, Mara.”

She swore, and made a decision.

“You can’t die, Catra.”

_No._

“Well, you can, but I think you already knew that, didn’t you?”

Catra grit her teeth, staring straight ahead. It wasn’t possible. It wasn’t _her._ She was wrong.

“How?” she asked. “How would you even know?”

She raised an eyebrow. “Because I can’t, either.”

For a moment, the world made sense. Everything clicked into place: the fights, the injuries, the bets, the dares, the reckless desire for something _more._ Something unattainable, something just out of reach. Something Catra could never have.

Life, maybe. She didn’t know.

The moment passed, and Catra shook her head.

“You’re lying,” she said, raising her voice over the wind. Rain fell in sheets over the sea, drenching and nearly blinding her. The slice of sky on the horizon slipped and faded, dusk to dark in a second. Lightning arced overhead, splitting the sky between shadows and white-gold light. She looked away from the woman and the answers she’d never had the courage to ask for to the deck below. Scorpia was making her way toward Catra, surely to offer relief, but Catra knew this ship better than anyone, and knew its strengths.

“Below! _Get below!”_ she shouted, momentarily forgetting the woman beside her. Scorpia wiped rain from her eyes to see her. She shook her head.

 _“Do it!”_ Catra repeated, and something in her eyes must have scared her friend, because she turned and stalked toward the stairs, stopping only a moment to snatch up a young crew member from their pathetic hiding place against the rail. A wave swelled over the side, ice shooting through her veins and clearing her mind of anything but white static and the mental picture of the column of black water behind her, dark clouds above, and an invisible path to safety off the ship’s bow.

The woman struggled to keep her footing beside her, one hand in the rigging and the other on the rail. She should have known to get to safety— relative as it was— but she wasn’t Catra’s responsibility. If she went under, she went, and Catra would be rid of her.

Waves crashed against the ship’s hull, hitting them from the side instead of head-on, twisting the deck unpleasantly beneath her feet. The creaking was lost to the wind and rain, thunder rumbling constantly over and through the water, lightning soaring through the elements. They kept a steady distance from the waterspout, as light as they were, soaring over the shallows with every intention to get to deep waters if they could. The waves would be bigger there, but the chances of getting slammed against the seafloor were small enough to risk it. They could come back from being stranded; not from such an impact.

If they could just make it there.

Something scraped beneath her.

The shoals.

Shooting up her shins and through her bones, the wooden hull dragged against the seafloor. Heart racing, Catra held her ground, knowing letting up would mean being smashed to pieces, crushed between water and land and—

 _“Let go!”_

The woman appeared at Catra’s side, hair plastered to her face. She blinked through the wind, one hand on the helm, just beneath Catra’s. Grabbing Catra’s elbow to steady herself, she shouted again, voice lost to the wind. Catra shook her head.

“We won’t make it here,” she said. A wave smashed against the hull, larger than the others, and Catra lurched to the side, losing her balance. The woman grabbed her by the collar before she could react, thrown sideways, pulling her back to the helm. She caught Catra’s elbow for her own balance, stumbling as another wave hit them. She reached over Catra’s shoulder to help her steer, caging her in to ground her and allow her to keep the ship steady.

“We have to go,” the woman shouted. Catra shook her head. She would go down here, or not at all.

“Catra,” she warned. “Let go.”

“No,” she said, too quiet to hear, but the woman seemed to anyway. She pulled her close, Catra’s back to her stomach, one arm coming up across her chest to hold her close. A swell caught them, raising the ship off the seafloor, but as they were light it would be only moments before they hit the ground again in the fall.

“Please, Catra. Trust me.”

She tightened her grip. Too many lives were in her hands. She would not let them down.

“Why would I?” she asked but the wind tore the words from her mouth, whisked them away to a silent place where they would never be heard. It didn’t matter that she knew the woman was a liar, a thief, something to be reckoned with. It didn’t matter that Catra should have the upper hand, here, or that she would give more than she had to save these people.

Catra couldn’t win.

She didn’t know who had sent this woman or what enemy she could have made to deserve this, but there was nothing she could have done to stop her.

Her hand came to Catra’s wrist, gripping tight enough to make Catra’s hold falter. Then she was stumbling backward and rising, the ship caught in a wave higher than any she’d seen before, higher and higher, reaching for the heavens as if her answers might lay there.

“Stop,” she shouted, when the woman’s back hit the rail, clawing at her arm.

 _“Stop,”_ she shouted, choking out the word on a sob, rain, tears, and salt mixing in her eyes. She reached for the woman’s face, scrambling for anything to stop this, but the deck was tipping, them with it, and Catra realizes with a cold certainty that his woman will be the death of her.

They fell, weightless.

It wasn’t unfamiliar to be unsteady at sea, so much so that one got used to the rocking and shifting and made it their center, adjusting as if life on the sea were more natural than any other. Catra lived a landlocked life for too many years, but her calling to the sea was a summons home, an escape, an open-ended answer only she could find the answer to. 

Birth on land.

Death at sea.

Weightless.

The woman’s arm tightened across Catra’s chest as they fell, the ship’s dark shape obscured almost immediately by the rain clouding her vision. The water hit her like cement, knocking Catra’s breath from her lungs and paralyzing her in frozen shock, pushed into the heart of the sea by malicious waves. The sea raged against them, tough and relentless, merciless in its power and determined to tear them apart. Still, the woman held on. There was no fighting it, but Catra would rather die than give in.

She kicked forward, overcoming her panic, careless of the hand gripping her bicep, hoping the woman at least had the survivability to attempt to reach the surface, though there was no getting back to the ship once they did. There was only lightning and crashing waves, salt burning her skin with every drop. Ice burning through her veins, her heartbeat matching the drum of raindrops. A hand on her arm, shifting to her waist. Pulling her up. The sea, black and white, jarring and smooth, the depths below beckoning her down. Dull weight in her feet, shifting at her side.

 _It’s cold,_ Catra realized dimly. Thunder rumbled through the water. _Quiet._ Her head buzzed, faint growing louder, pressure and peace.

Weightless.

Catra knew herself. She knew her limits, and she knew when she was beat.

 _I was right_ , she thought, and wished she’d been wrong.

_iv._

**Present day**

They catch her. She has no weapons with which to defend herself, and the town’s patrol sees through her shaken lies, naming her as a pirate and nothing more, nothing less. Catra finds herself thrown in a cell, alone but for one person expecting more of her than she’s willing to give. She brushes dirt off her hands and stands, trying to think.

The guard had mentioned over a day had passed since the storm’s peak. Her crew would be making reparations to the ship by now (if they’d made it out, and so far the woman’s word was worth dust), assuming Catra dead and making way to move on with their lives. It’s what the plan had always been— don’t get held up. Don’t get caught. And _don’t_ give away the crew.

She drops to the floor, laying on her back and staring at the ceiling. The bars of the cell are well made, sitting on cleanly oiled hinges, nothing for her to exploit or ruin easily. A window overlooks the sea on the wall, ten feet wide but only three inches tall. They’d taken the keys upstairs with them, and slammed the door for good measure. There’s nothing for her to do, but she has to think of something to save herself— no one else will, and she cannot spend the rest of her days here. She won’t allow it.

In the cell catty-corner to hers, a man hums a quiet song. He fiddles with a block of wood and a dull knife, deft fingers dancing over the carved wood speaking to years of experience. He looks up at her through bushy white eyebrows, piercing eyes studying her for a moment before dropping back to his work. His song echoes against the stone walls, falls flat on the dirt floor. He hums the tune absently, the words an offhand addition.

 _“Death hands you a token,”_ he wheezes. _“Death expects a price…”_

A clatter down the hall has Catra on her feet, hands tight on the bars to her cell. She leans as far into the bars as she can, vying for a look as to what had caused the disturbance. The guards’ voices notably absent, Catra holds her breath, hoping, dreading, waiting.

“Hey, Catra.”

Fuck.

She steps back and drops her hands to her sides. The woman strolls down the hall, hands in her pockets, key ring clinking heavily in her pocket. She wears a bag slung over her shoulder, her hair in a ponytail— the same one she’d worn aboard the ship. She stops outside Catra’s cell.

Catra puts her hands on her hips. The woman tilts her head. Blonde glints deep gold in the low light, the coming sunrise blurring her edges, deepening pink to red, silver to gold.

“Dawn’s on its way,” the woman says lightly. “Coming or going?”

“Going,” Catra responds. The woman’s eyes darken.

“It’s one word, Catra. You’re seriously going to sit here and rot for your pride?”

A floor away, footsteps echo over wooden floors. Catra tenses.

“Doesn’t look like I’ll be here long,” she says. The woman’s jaw tightens. “You’re still wrong.”

“Am I?”

Catra nods. She’s seen it time and time again, death hooking its claws into countless souls, dragging them to a world she has yet to see. “Death comes for us all.”

The woman hums agreement. The sun begins to rise over the sea, a narrow line of red cutting a line across the woman’s eyes. “Eventually, yes. In the meantime…” she trails off, eyes sliding over Catra. She shivers from the weight of her gaze, recognizing the age hidden behind bright blue.

“Come what will.”

Catra shakes her head and turns away. The woman shifts behind her, the keys in her pocket ringing quietly. Voices echo above, paired with creaking floorboards. The man’s tune fades in and out with their words.

“This way’s easier, you know. We don’t get that choice often.”

“There is no ‘we,’” Catra says. She crosses her arms to hide her shaking hands. “There is no ‘us.’ It’s you and me, separate, and I don’t owe you anything. I won’t.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Catra sees the woman’s face clear. She straightens, putting her hands on the bars like she’s the one trapped. “Owing,” she repeats. Understanding sparks in her eyes. “This isn’t— okay, look. I owe you for taking you from your ship, and I don’t want to be in your debt.”

“What?” Catra turns. The woman’s face is set, serious, but she isn’t done speaking. She reaches through the bars.

“This will make us not even for what I did but closer to it, and it’s no favor of mine to set you free. It’s an apology that comes with no cost but a name, I swear to you it’s the truth.”

Catra looks at the woman’s outstretched hand. The door at the top of the stairs slams open, footsteps clattering on the stairs. The man in the cell across from her meets her eyes over the woman’s shoulder.

 _“Learned…”_ his breath hitches in his throat. He coughs to clear it, relentless tremors racking through his body. A crooked smile reveals bloody teeth. The footsteps grow louder.

_“Learned your lesson thrice.”_

Catra shivers, the words achingly familiar, a haunting reminder of what’s to come. The man’s eyes glaze over, the last of the song’s notes drifting through the cell, waiting for a second voice to echo his, to carry on the tune, the reminder, the reaping. It doesn’t come.

Catra looks to him, to the stairs, to the woman. She turns to the sea behind her, ink glinting red in the rising sun, empty horizon and endless future, if she can only make it to shore.

Clear blue eyes, familiar in a way she should not know. Wide and trusting, and something twists in Catra’s stomach.

 _Trust her,_ a voice whispers.

“Tell me,” the woman pleads. She holds out her hand. Voices echo off stone walls, the man’s carving clatters to the floor, and Catra takes the bait.

“Adora.”

  
  


_v._

**6 years later**

Catra stands at the helm, one wrist draped over the helm, the other flipping a small blade over her fingers. Words clatter through her mind like loose change, a memory she should avoid but can’t find the strength to look away from.

_Immortal._

She hates it. She doesn’t fully know what it means, yet, but she’s beginning to suspect. Catra tries not to think about it— and manages not to, on the good days— but today is different. Something’s coming, though she’s not sure exactly what it is yet. She doesn’t know what to make of the feeling, and the memories playing out behind her eyes.

Sighing, Catra tucks the knife into her boot (never too many knives, no matter what Scorpia says, though there’s never enough danger to keep them all busy) and gestures to Lennox, a somewhat high-strung officer that had sailed with her for years. He takes the helm with a nod as she passes and ducks into the chart room. For a moment, another night flashes before her eyes: Lennox, young and worried, hands shaking over skewed charts, knowing what would come next. Navy and gray reigning outside, lightning crackling at the edges of her vision. Adora waiting at the center of it all.

And Catra, unchanged. More tired, maybe, the sting in her voice a little gentler, now.

Catra lets out a slow breath, letting the memory wash away. It should fade with time, but it only clears, frosted edges biting with each passing winter, bringing out details she’d missed the first time around. Someday, Catra will have to seek out the consequences for the answers she hadn’t wanted. Someday, she’ll be faced with a truth she knows she can’t speak, a challenge she won’t want to face.

Someday, far away, in the future.

For now, Catra finds the log she was looking for and goes back above decks, finding herself at the bow of the ship. She hovers there for a moment too long, wind pushing her curls out of her face, smooth and tangy and smelling of salt and sunshine. Footsteps creak on the boards behind her, a sound as familiar to her as the wind and waves, more than Catra’s voice in her own ears.

“Scorpia,” she greets quietly.

“Catra,” her friend responds. Scorpia leans over the rail next to Catra, looking to the water below. Catra keeps her eyes on the horizon, one hand wrapped around the telescope in her pocket she’d meant to use to sight a distant line of ships, black against blue. She waits, expecting Scorpia to speak, assuming she’d sought her out for a purpose. After it’s clear Scorpia is waiting for her to lead, she lets out a heavy sigh.

“What is it?” she asks. After so many years together— it must be twenty, now— Catra knows when something’s bothering her friend. The only issue is that this time, Catra doesn’t know what it is.

“We’re friends, aren’t we?”

Catra turns to her, surprise etched over her face. Scorpia knows this, _has_ known this since she first weasled it out of Catra nearly two years into their friendship, back when they were landlocked kids looking for adventure in the world standing still.

“Of course.”

Scorpia doesn’t sigh, but something in her sage, a silence concession to a weariness Catra hadn’t known she’d been bearing. “Then why are you lying to me?”

Catra blanches, fumbles for her words.

“It’s okay,” Scorpia reassures, misreading Catra’s confusion for defense. “It’s just...we’re getting old, Catra.” She looks tired.

Catra shakes her head slowly, taking her eyes off the horizon to look at her. Worry lines her face. Catra doesn’t know how long she has borne these marks of time. Scorpia follows her gaze to the darkening sky behind them, thunder rolling across the water toward them. Across the other side of the sea, the ships flicker out of sight against a brilliant horizon.

“I’m not,” Catra says softly. Scorpia turns pitying eyes on her.

“That’s the problem.”

-

Sitting alone in the only place on the ship Catra can confidently call her own, Catra wonders for a moment if she just made the first mistake in a long line of many.

Scorpia had asked for the truth. It wasn’t one easily given, as Catra hadn’t fully accepted it herself, but a day would come when she could run from it no more, and she feared it was sooner than she expected.

They had agreed that Catra would leave. Not now, and not for some time to come, but eventually the tide would turn, and she would go with it.

A few more years.

A little more time.

A breath of peace, and she would go.

She wonders idly when it will be, staring at the ceiling of her room. Light wavers over the ceiling, catching on a high shelf littered with trinkets she’d collected over the years, most from Scorpia. Footsteps thud overhead and in the hall. Voices come from above, muted through walls and blurred by the wind. It’s familiar, and warm, and safe. For now, she has time.

-

**Two days later**

They’re being boarded.

On the deck above, footsteps and crates clatter on wood, angry shouts cracking across the night like whips. Catra, who finished her turn at the helm an hour before and has slept not even half the time since, slips to the floor, reaching under the bolted-down dresser for the pistol she stored there years ago. She checks it over— it’s in good condition, her skills rusty where the metal shines. She hates to use it, but unless they’re lucky, their attackers will be smart enough to stay out of reach of her knives.

Belting the holster around her waist, Catra loads the pistol. Four shots. It’ll have to be enough. She tucks it into the holster and grabs the last of her knives, the shouts overhead already meeting the crew’s voices. She searches her room, tearing it apart for anything other than the gun and her knives. She takes a small bottle of oil wrapped in cloth from a shelf, and if she can make it to the hold in time, she can take back her ship. She can’t wait any longer.

Three men clamber down the stairs behind her second after she slips through the hall, keeping her steps as light as she can over the creaking wood, hoping the sounds of the ship will cover her. She passes two crew members still in bed, not yet knowing they’re in danger. She doesn’t warn them— no time, and suspicion would only lower her chances.

In the back of the hold, nestled in a row behind bags of rations and excess rope, she finds what she’s looking for.

Low voices outside, not her crew. Heart pounding, Catra drops to one knee, and puts her plan together.

-

Their captain stands on the main deck, a stout man with wide shoulders and calloused hands, a brawler judging by the single gun at his hip and scars marring his knuckles and face, marked from eye to jaw. Black and red tattoos adorn his arms, roses with thorns in the shape of daggers. Hands on his hips and wide smile in place, he studies the pirates before him with a slick smile, greased-back hair shining in the sunlight. He turns toward the stairs leading below. Catra, crouched just out of sight, ducks away, heart pounding.

Four opponents in her line of sight, the captain, and at least six surrounding her crew, who stand with their hands or guns drawn on them. _Ruffagains,_ Scorpia would call them. Straight out of a book, but meaner and nastier, the flag from the small vessel overboard flying red— no survivors.

Catra checks her supplies. Two chances and two shots after.

She takes a deep breath and releases it slowly, steadying herself. The man’s voice echoes above, carried by the wind, attention on him. Calling for their captain— calling for her.

Catra steps onto the main deck. Two spot her, and she flings one of the two small cloth bags from her waist to the sky with one hand, the other tight around the pistol’s grip. It arcs gracefully above them and several turn to look, spotting the shadow as it crosses the deck in its path. At its peak, Catra raises the gun and shoots.

She closes her eyes in the breath after she pulls the trigger, but the explosion still burns bright against her eyelids, the sun behind it a momentary costar to its light. The resounding _bang_ that comes with it startles the crew and their attackers both, sending them ducking for cover and covering their ears. She pushes forward in the confusion— through the crowd, a knife in her hand disappearing into another’s. Gunpowder soaked in oil, and she’s always been a marksman.

“Quiet!” the captain shouts, holding his hands up. He sees Catra instantly by the rail, eyes narrowing on first the gun in her hands, second on the bag in her other hand, held free of the barrel’s heat. She raises an eyebrow— in the thirty seconds he’d lost, she’d gained their attention, gotten them all in her line of sight, and set three of her own out free (not that the captain knows that). He growls, smile wiped away in the face of a new threat.

Catra’s reputation wasn’t built from nothing, though some might say it was. Half the stories about her were lies. The other half were extreme exaggerations, or another’s story with her name stitched neatly overtop. It didn’t matter— they came from something, and that something was what Catra was willing to risk. Today, the only thing worth losing was already on the line.

The man studies her. The ship creaks and groans, rocking unpleasantly under their feet. With no one to man the helm they’d turned sideways, waves crashing against the hull head-on, swaying side to side. She waits, letting the silence draw out, watching for the captain to make a move— they could sit here all day for all she cared. Catra wasn’t a part of their well-orchestrated plan. She wouldn’t help them fit her into place.

“Sanchez,” he says, eventually. She doesn’t respond. Scorpia tries to catch her eye, widening her eyes and jerking her chin to someone, but Catra doesn’t look away, resolute on keeping their leader in her sight. She’s seen this kind of team before, one man in charge of it all with the rest scrambling to follow. They wouldn’t know what to do once he fell, and Catra’s crew could overtake them in a flash.

He spits on the deck. It’s trivial and stupid, but sends a flash of anger through her. He nods.

“Do it.”

Too late, Catra realizes her only defense is a perfect attack. She throws the cloth— away from her, over the edge of the deck, but by someone else’s miracle the bullet hits the powder, explosion throwing her to the deck with its power— she’d been liberal with her measurements, expecting its power to be inflicted on anyone but her. The flare blinds her, smoke filling her lungs, and Scorpia shouts when she hits the deck. Low laughter jostles in her ears. She jumps to her feet, eyes filled with smoke, and meets the captain’s fist with her knife.

He jumps back, falling into a defensive position, blood spilling from his knuckles. She advances— ducks under a fist aimed to her cheek, directing it away from her with her left. Her dagger flips in her hand, blade pointing down, and she uses her momentum to drag it against his arm as she ducks, silver slipping free when he grunts in pain and sending it into his calf. She hits the ground and takes another dagger to the inside of his ankle. Expecting it, he kicks her back, sending her skidding back a foot, coughing and out of breath.

The world is dangerously bright, sun sparkling off the sea blinding her, ringing growing louder in her ears and smoke filling her lungs, threatening to choke her. Still she stands— or tries to, but someone grabs her shoulder

 _That’s cheating,_ Catra thinks dimly, before they throw her back to the deck. Her face burns with shame, the initial fault only hers and well paid-for. She hasn’t gone down this quick in ages, not since she was just starting her time on the seas.

“Is this your captain?” the man shouts. Spit flies from his mouth, dotting her face. The sun behind him cuts his silhouette across her vision, the bright sky behind him painful in her eyes. Someone holds her back by her shoulder, and the pressure releases a moment only for a foot to slam into her sternum when she tries to sit up.

“Is _this,_ ” the man asks, waving a hand to her and looking out at her crew. “Your captain?” Eyes avert his, either regathering their composure from the fight or embarrassed at the sight before them. So many years of Catra protecting them, and the first time she goes down, they leave her in the dust. Catra bites back a bitter laugh.

“I thought not,” the man mutters. He leans forward, putting his weight on her chest and Catra wheezes, grabbing his ankle with both hands in an effort to alleviate the pain. Something cracks, sharp pain over her heart where it’d been a dull roar before. Her head falls back to the deck beneath her. It’s not enough. It’s never fucking enough.

“What do you want?”

Catra distantly recognizes the fire in the voice, appreciates it, although she knows the trouble will only rise if they keep that fire burning. Still, she needs another hand if she can pull this off.

“What do I want?” the man drums his fingers against the pistol at his hip. The question takes his attention away from Catra and the pressure with it, leaving her with a different pain than his weight.

“Well, let me introduce myself, first.” The man steps back— _thankfully,_ and the world regains little of its color— to pace the deck, a snake rearing to strike. He spreads his arms wide, unarmed but for the pistol at his hip. Catra would call him a fool for his pride if she weren’t concussed and bleeding on the deck of her own ship.

“I, Captain J. Rosa of the _Thorn,_ have come to challenge the legendary captain of the _Halfmoon,”_ he boasts. Rosa turns to Catra at this, who has propped herself up on her elbows, head spinning. His next words are lost to her, only ragged breathing and rushing blood in her ears.

“...the theatrics if I’d known,” Rosa finishes, earning a dry laugh from his crew. One near to Catra stands with his hands empty, waiting to stop her should she try to advance. She spits at his boots; he only steps away. A voice meets Rosa’s, rising to counter as Catra sits up as fast as she can without further injuring herself. Rosa casts a disdainful look her way, clearly having expected better. He scoffs and turns to the crew, continuing his proposal from when she’d been below.

“So I offer you this: everything you have, in exchange for your lives.” His expression shifts and Rosa shrugs, smiling pleasantly as if he’d instead offered them wealth and fine weather. “Sound fair?”

“You fly red,” Catra challenges, well aware of the little time she has remaining. Scorpia narrows her eyes; the rest of her crew’s expressions turn to ones of matching confusion. Catra smiles, knife-like, aware of the blood on her teeth and fire in her eyes. She stands, and doesn’t waver.

“No.”

Rosa shoots her.

It’s effective: head and heart.

It _hurts_ , even though she’d been expecting it. Even though she’d been counting on it.

What she isn’t counting on is the darkening sky, the deck falling away under her feet. The distant sound of her body hitting the deck, of shouts following her fall. The space after her last breath before she sinks, blue giving way to nothing. Nothing turning to black, a deep, rippling fabric over her vision, and black giving way to solid ground.

Catra hadn’t counted on this.

-

She wakes on the docks.

For a moment, she’s safe. Anywhere near the sea means escape, and in the space before the fear, she breathes a sigh of relief.

Then, the silence sets in.

Dimly, the world around her comes into view. She focuses first on the worn wood beneath her hands, faded brown blanks charred black at the edges, crumbling under her touch. Ash drifts through widening gaps to the sea beneath. Between the planks, water glints black— not that of the night sky, but of pure ink and sticky tar, allowing no blue as to the depth of the water or what may lay beneath, feet or miles under her hands. It twists, forming a face she should know— once recognized in a dream, a memory, a faded future she has yet to meet. Her fingers twitch, hand moving toward the water free of her own will. It rises to meet her, mirroring slender fingers, glossy and black and reaching, wanting to touch, to hold, to pull her close and drag her under.

The spell breaks and Catra jerks back, scrambling to her feet. The hand at the edge of the platform drops away, water splashing back into its mesmerizing pattern, swirling and dipping over unseen valleys beneath its surface. Catra realizes she’s gasping for breath, heart pounding, and takes another step back, checking over her shoulder to see if anyone had noticed the sentient force of nature she’d nearly fallen for.

She’s alone. Catra realizes with a start that the ashen docks are deserted but for her, her only companions creaking wood, quiet water, and hushed wind scraping stone. Fearful her hands will wander again, Catra runs her hands over where her knives should sit, itching fingers finding only empty sheathes. Even her gun is gone, though one of Rosa’s crew had kicked it from her hand long before she’d fallen. She pushes the thought away— of black silk parting around her as she fell, breath crushed from her lungs, cool air against her face, the glint of gold behind her eyes— she turns to the walkways.

She’s on seaside docks, but they’re unlike anything she’s ever seen before. Most dockside port towns have some semblance of order to them, but these spread out in a twisting labyrinth, interconnected lines leading from nothing to nowhere. They spread left to right as far as she can see, fading against the blackened sea with a horizon to match, the world wrapped in deep shadows, drained of its color. Catra turns slowly from the docks, eyes narrowed as she looks to the thing she’d instinctively named as the sea.

Before her is an ocean of ink, blacker than the deepest depths of moonless nights. Waves shift erratically, not in the smooth tides she expects but dizzying ups and downs, rising over hills and dipping valleys unseen beneath the surface, falling into streams flowing the wrong direction, twisting into whirlpools instead of the reliable tides knows so well. Catra watches for a beat too long and the docks beneath her feet tip and turn, nearly spilling her sideways with the sudden dizziness. She tears her eyes from the sea, low black mist hovering over the sea blurring into a smooth plane with the pitch-black sky beyond.

Behind her, where common sense would claim the coast to be, a ghost town at least if not taverns and inns bustling with activity, is a wall. It looks to be made of obsidian, a glassy sheet of rock stretching to charcoal skies. Catra squints at where the clouds should meet the cliff face and looks again, trying to pick out the dividing lines. Only after it refuses to clarify does Catra realize that the clouds _are_ the wall, tipping vertically and arcing into something pressed solid, the wall and sky one and the same material. She takes a step back.

Dark clouds hover close above her, trapping her as if in a cavern. Catra instinctively knows there’s no light on the other side of them, but something as dark and solid as the wall at the edge of the world, hidden by charcoal dust coalesced in the deepest black she’s ever seen. The clouds shift slowly above her, another chaotic pattern matching the waves beneath her feet, moving with extreme gravitas. She looks away, again— nothing here is kind to see, an inbetween meant for quick glances rather than careful observation.

The horizon, though dark and blurred, is more familiar than anything else in this purgatory. Catra frowns, knowing something caught her eye but unsure of what it might have been. Keeping away from the reaching water, she walks to the edge of the docks where they meet the open sea, afraid to run lest the planks crumble beneath her.

A ship looms on the water, rising from the sea. Streams of black water crash from the mast and tattered sails, part around the hull as it climbs from the depths. It’s abandoned, as is everything else, the ghost ship Catra dreamed about as a child, back when she feared monsters more than men and her own imagination over the world she had yet to face. Her eyes harden now as it approaches.

On the main deck, a figure watches. One hand rests on a staff at his side, his weight half held by its height. He slouches in dark robes, face obscured by shadows, and turns away, descending to belowdecks. Catra watches the ship rise to surface level, settling atop the waves with a crash, a wave rushing from its base to the docks. She steps back before it reaches her, watching the ripples skim under the planks. When she looks up, the ship has docked impossibly fast, a plank extended from the soaking deck to the docks.

She looks to the wall behind her, a glossy black gate keeping her from the life she knows she must return to. There are no answers behind her, so Catra turns, straightens her shoulders, and climbs aboard.

-

Puddles of water cover her boots as she walks, shockingly cold one step, entirely neutral in temperature the next. The ship is bigger than she would have expected, a broad deck that could easily accommodate three times the number she sails with. Catra curses and walks the length of the ship, ending up at the helm. The wood is the same black of the rest of the world, though the grain beneath her fingers is the same as her own ship’s.

She drops her hand from the helm, circling the quarterdeck. The stairs creak under her feet, rivulets of water draining over them and out the ship’s sides, space between the rails for it to drain properly.

Looking over the docks, Catra pauses. They’re different from above, translucent haloes of light hovering atop them, lazily drifting along the planks like leaves caught in lazy wind. She watches them absently, gauzy white against black and gray, the only spot of something other than shadows. Even Catra herself is faded, the red of her headband muted brown, clothes ashen gray and looking as if she’d gone through a dustorm.

Eventually, Catra gets the sense that something’s wrong. She knows she can’t go below, but there’s something... _else_ aboard, watching her, or simply aware of her presence. Once she notices it the feeling doesn’t fade and she clenches her jaw, resolute eyes searching the ship for whatever the imposter might be.

A moment later, she recognizes that it’s her.

Let it be made clear: Catra doesn’t run from things. She simply goes to where she has the higher ground.

That’s what she does now, taking the gangplank back to the docks, eyes glued to the steps leading to belowdecks as she leaves. The spirits avoid her and the ship, trailing between the pathways, over the water and occasionally through each other. She watches them a moment longer, and when she turns, the figure stands before her.

Looking at him is like watching an explosion in reverse. Everything trails toward him, comet’s tails inverted to his heart. He stands taller than her, even slouched as he is, leaning on the scythe he holds. Stealing the energy, draining the world, he must be the reason everything has fallen from what it once was. The boards under his feet creak and groan, ashen gray and spreading like disease from his touch.

 _Your token,_ he says, holding out a hand to her, and she shakes her head. She tries to speak. Her voice catches in her throat and she stumbles, falls to her knees as her hands rise to her throat. She steadies herself, one hand on the dock swaying lightly beneath her knees with the waves, other against her throat, trying to speak, failing, attempting again. She raises her eyes to meet the figure before her.

Death— because that’s who he is, who else would it be?— kneels before her, hand sliding down the length of the scythe. His hood draped over his eyes hides his expression, only a grinning, ash-slicked jaw gleaming beneath the fabric. He raises his hand, skeletal fingers hovering between them. Catra looks from his hand to him, fear building cold in her stomach.

She shakes her head.

Death stands slowly, smoothly, tattered robes hushing quietly. Souls brush past her— through her— to board the ship, gliding up the gangplank, touches feather light against her skin as they pass. They leave her there, gasping for breath, searching for the strength to speak. Free of passengers, the bridge falls into the sea silently, water reaching and caving to meet it, darkness swelling before Catra’s eyes where she tries to watch the movement. Aboard, he inclines his head.

 _Payment,_ he lectures. _Is not an option._

“I can’t,” she whispers. Her hand falls from her throat to the docks. Ink reaches for her, barred only by ashen planks. The ship pulls away, guided by malicious waters, sinking until only the tip of it’s mast hovers above the water. A barren banner flies from it, dirty gray cloth emblazoned with a black circle, a square cut through its center. It sinks, and she is alone on the docks once again.

Exhaustion blurs her thoughts, pulls at her bones, whispers in her mind. _Sleep_ , it says, and the water laughs with it. She walks, instead. Her chest aches over her heart, and her forehead burns with a bright pain she can’t place. Still, she walks, and the cliffs rise before her.

The wall is smooth and cool, almost glassy beneath her touch. Catra presses against it, knowing it’s the water, knowing it’s the sky and the clouds and nothing substantial. It holds, firm and tangible. She places both hands against it and leans her weight into it.

“Fuck you,” she whispers to it, knowing she’s asking for help. The sea giggles at her pleading. “Let me through.”

Against her palms, rock softens, and she falls.

It’s the same as before, first slow and then faster and faster through the same thick darkness. Then in reverse, surging toward the surface, heart hammering in her chest and pressure against her lungs, building to bursting and she fears the force will tear her apart from the inside, such a searing pain she almost can’t handle. The nothingness shifts to something, faded and dark, all muted to her ears. She blinks, slow, brown blurry in shuttered eyes. When she opens her eyes, it’s sand beneath her hands— but not of the ocean.

Catra groans and falls to the side, blinking up at the sky above her. Stadium walls blur at the edges of her vision, crisp white stands, banners snapping bright colors. She presses a hand to her chest, where the bullet wound should be. There’s nothing— cloth and the edge of her necklace under her shirt, but no blood, no metal that had pierced her heart.

Something shifts, and Catra turns her head, squinting through wavering lines of light. The sky is too bright, too bold, dizzying and painful to look at. A figure crouches beside her, reaching for her. They mutter something and start to search her, patting her down.

“Get off,” Catra mutters, trying weakly to push them away. Should she be on the ship? Adora had been right— she could die. She could come _back,_ which was the more important of the two.

“Where is it?” a voice asks, distant. Catra shoves the hands away and they sit back on their heels with an annoyed huff, arms crossed.

“I’m trying to help you,” someone says indignantly.

“Who are you?” Catra asks. The world crystallizes in a shattering array of color: blue summer sky, white columns, yellow sand, and dark eyes. The woman reaches for her again, frowning. She takes Catra’s face in her hands, turning her head to look at her.

“You’re lost,” she mutters. Catra doesn’t have the strength to pull back. The woman moves her hands from her face and Catra falls back on her elbows, dizzy and out of breath. The voice washes over her, familiar and steady.

“...to go,” she urges. Catra blinks up at her.

“What?”

“Say you want to go,” she repeats. She kneels in the dirt next to Catra, white tunic unmarred. “Catra. It is vital you leave.”

She licks her lips. The blue sky isn’t as sharp as before, a normal day instead of blinding white-blue that seared her eyes before.

“I want to go,” she says weakly. The woman nods.

“Again.”

“I want to go.” This time much firmer, and thunder rumbles overhead. The woman looks to the sky. 

“Who are you?” Catra asks.

“Not enough,” the woman muttered. She looked back to Catra. “It’s not enough.”

“What?”

She reached for her, patting her down, checking in her pockets and running her hands over the empty sheathes at her waist. Catra falls back on her back, blue above her tinted black at the edges of her vision. Flags whip in the wind, white swords outlined on blue and red banners.

“Where is it?” she mutters. Then, to Catra: “Say it again.”

“I want to go,” she repeats. The thunder comes again, louder this time. The woman curses and reaches for Catra, pulling her to a sitting position.

“What do you have? A token, maybe, or something that doesn’t belong to you.”

Catra shakes her head, dizzy and disoriented. The woman puts an arm around her shoulders to hold her up. She catches her breath. She pulls Catra’s necklace from under her shirt, rusty chain glinting silver through red. She looks at Catra curiously, for a moment hesitant in her panic.

“Where did you get this?”

Gold glints from the end of the chain, but before Catra can look, it’s gone, vanishing into the woman’s closed fist. She pulls the chain from under her hair and stands, backing away from Catra.

“Say your name,” she instructs. “And repeat what I told you.”

“Who are you?” Catra asks again. The woman looks to the sky. Bruised purple and navy, deep clouds building from every side of the stadium. They block out the sun, and the temperature drops ten degrees in a second. Wind whisks across the stadium floor, taking sand with it. The woman holds up a hand to shield her eyes.

“No one. Do not speak of me, at least for now.”

“Why?”

She shakes her head. “In time you’ll see. Good luck, Catra.” She jogs to the center of the arena, closed fist held high. Catra repeats the words, first loudly, then quiet as her energy leaves her, staring at the sky above her. The woman shouts: in defiance, anger, fear. She fades away.

The thunder grows, shaking the stadium. The woman’s voice comes again, blue fades to black, and everything falls away.

-

Catra wakes to the blue sky, the rocking ship, and a fight. She lurches forward, gritting her teeth and slapping someone’s hand away. Crew scramble back amid shouts and wide eyes as she climbs to her feet, storming across the deck to grab the culprit’s wrist mid-swing.

It doesn’t matter that there are eleven of them to match her own crew. It doesn’t matter that they’ve got guns where she has nothing, not even her dagger. It doesn’t matter that he could shoot her again in the space of a breath, because what would it do?

It’s a simple answer: Not a damn thing.

At the sight of her, the blood drains from the man’s face— he’d called himself Rosa, Catra remembers. The moments before her momentary death flash before her eyes: the cruel twist of his mouth, the cold gleam in his eyes. He hadn’t hesitated. Catra wonders if, in his position, she would have.

“Capta—”

Before Rosa can finish the word, Catra twists his arm behind his back in a swift gesture, the gun slipping from his grasp. She catches it one-handed, tucking it into her waistband as she kicks the man’s knee out from under him. It’s a dirty move, but she thinks it makes up for getting shot. Metal burns against the small of her back, although cooler than she would’ve expected. She doesn’t know how long she was gone.

He goes down with a shout, hitting the planks hard. She aims another kick at his stomach, leaving him wheezing in a similar fashion to what he’d done to her only minutes ago. For a moment, the rocking of the ship is the only movement, every pair of eyes on Catra. She wipes her temple with the back of her hand, clearing blood out of her eyes.

 _As long as they know,_ she thinks grimly to herself, _better make a show out of it._ Her encounter with Death— as a creature, not just the brief absence of life— had shaken her, although the certain knowledge grounds her in the same way. What is life without end? What the hell is she supposed to do? How can she go on like this? She shakes the thoughts away— for now, she only sees that her crew needs her help, and she won’t let them down again. She can’t let them see through her. The deck sways slow and steady beneath her feet, a reminder that this is _her_ ship and her life, and they can’t take that away from her. No one can take it from her.

Well. They can’t take the ship, anyway.

 _Make it worth it,_ a voice hisses in her ear. She looks to Rosa, her mother’s words pushing her forward.

“You done?” she asks him in a monotone voice. He pushes himself up on one hand, stammering for words.

“You— you were—”

“I was what?” Catra wipes a hand on her shirt, smearing the blood to her palms. Flicking red off her fingers, she surveys her crew. “What a mess,” she mutters. Rosa’s eyes stay trained on her.

 _“Demon,”_ he hisses. Catra stills. Taking her pause for admission to truth, Rosa scrambles to his feet. Regathering some of the bravado he’d lost, he swings an arm toward her.

“Is this your captain? A _demon?”_ He spins toward her, vengeful glee glinting in his eyes. “You would dare follow a creature from _hell?”_ He laughs, a nasty, crooked sound, one his crew picks up in a moment.

“A demon for your captain,” he hisses, in Catra’s opinion _really_ trying to send the message home. He licks his teeth, blood trailing from the corner of his mouth. Catra keeps her face neutral, prepared for a fight, if—

“Yes.” Scorpia presses forward from the crowd, earnest eyes on the scene before her. Catra frowns, one hand moving slowly to the gun at her back. She shakes her head minutely, telling Scorpia to _back off_ while she figures out how to play this.

“She’s our captain,” Scorpia says, turning dark eyes on Rosa. Catra’s eyes widen. It’s one thing to be told, and another entirely to see it play out before her eyes. Catra had wondered, before, if Scorpia _really_ understood the meaning behind the pact they’d made, but it seemed Catra had underestimated her. She’s still Catra’s friend. She’s still her best chance.

“You follow the devil,” Rosa hisses.

“I follow Catra,” Scorpia clarifies. “I don’t care what she is.”

This time, it’s Catra’s turn to fight back. With Rosa defenseless she lungnes forward, and the crew follows suit.

It takes two minutes, Catra thinks. She’s not entirely sure— her head spins, though that’s from processing everything around her more than it is the fight or injuries she’d sustained. Staring at Rosa on the deck (had she killed him? She doesn’t remember), crew bustling around her to get themselves back on course and raiding the boat Rosa’s team had taken to them, she tenses when someone lays a hand on her shoulder.

“You okay, Catra?”

Scorpia. She relaxes, exhaling slowly. She should tell someone, about what she’d seen. About the ship on black water, the woman who guided her back to the surface. Only one person has those answers, though, and Catra’s not ready for that. She and Scorpia had made their pact, and she would stick with it.

“You sure you’re alright, Captain?” Scorpia repeats, and Catra guesses she’d responded unthinkingly.

“I’m fine,” Catra says. She kicks the body, watches the hand shift on the deck. Scorpia frowns, hand falling from her shoulder when laughs.

“I’m fucking immortal.”  
  


_vi._

**Two years later**

“Hi,” the man says, nodding with a sincere smile. Catra frowns, on-guard at the display of what seems to be genuine politeness.

“Hi,” she echoes. Catra looks him over appraisingly, noting the quiver of arrows slung over his shoulder, the sheathed knife at his hip. A fighter, but not one she’s used to. From the looks of him, he’s out of his depths here by the sea. She raises an eyebrow. It’s a look filled with challenge, not that the man seems to get it. He sits on the stool next to her, waving off the bartender when they look his way. Catra’s eyes narrow: men know too much, here, and her reputation sometimes gets the better of her.

Sometimes.

“What do you want?” she asks briskly, setting down the last of her meal. She brushes her hands together. The man takes his gaze from her, apparently unthreatened, drumming his fingers on the counter. He’s the picture of nonchalance in a place designed only for the dirtiest fighters and most ruthless warriors.

He’s _normal_. Catra doesn’t trust him.

“I’ve heard about you,” he starts, and Catra rolls her eyes.

 _“Please,”_ she says. “Everyone has.” He raises an eyebrow, but doesn’t comment on the arrogance.

“I’ve been trying to contact you. I take it you didn’t get any letters?” Though the words are accusatory, he smiles through them, speaking in a genuine tone though he _has_ to know she’s heard of him asking. He’d never given his name or a purpose other than something about a deal, and she’d ignored every one of the propositions. Catra doesn’t work well with others, and she doesn’t trust him, though she grudgingly admires his unexpectedness.

“Must be someone else,” she says dismissively. “Hope you find them.” She shrugs her coat over her shoulders and tosses a coin on the counter in a flick, bouncing straight into the bartender’s hand and to his pocket. They don’t acknowledge her or the man as she turns to leave, ready to defend herself. This knife is a favorite, won in a game of pure luck. She likes the reminder that not everything in the universe is against her.

“Captain,” the man says, following her out the door. He’s lucky none of her crew are here; they’d make a game of her humiliating him in a fight, verbal or physical.

“That’s me,” she says lightly, hopping onto the docks. It’s a short walk to the inn she and her crew have taken rooms at, but she veers the other way, inland. She recognizes this port, she realizes with a shock. It’s the one Adora dragged her to so many years ago.

“We should talk,” he says pleasantly. He falls into step with her easily, not a care in the world. He hadn’t been wearing it in the bar, but he slips a bow over his shoulder, now. It’s a poor choice for the life of a seafarer, another tally toward someone unaccustomed to the life she’s so comfortable with. Catra waits for him to continue. When she doesn’t have the answers, she typically shuts up and lets them come to her. It works better than most would expect.

“Catra,” the man stresses casually _,_ like he has any right to know her or refer to her by name like a friend. She lifts her knife from its holster, spinning it lightly over her fingers. This blade is lighter than air and twice as quick, known for the whispering sound of it slicing through the air before it cuts into her enemies.

Like she said: it’s a favorite.

“Captain, to you,” Catra says. She slows, stopping in the middle of the docs. The stranger turns to face her, standing opposite her like they’re about to duel. Part of Catra wishes for a fight; the other recognizes that it might not be one she can win.

It’s that look again. The same one she saw all those years ago, the glint in the eyes the same color as the sky she sails under every day.

Catra’s gotten herself trapped, again.

“I’m not listening to your bullshit,” she says bluntly, more a warning than anything else. The man smiles.

“So you know what I was going to say?” he prods, teasing.

“No.”

He smiles. Catra almost wants to trust him, inexplicably. “You do.”

“I said I _don’t,”_ she growls. The blade quickens its dance for a half-step before snapping into her palm, reflecting the burning sunset on the sea behind them. He holds out his hands, first before him, then one held between them.

“It’s nice to meet you,” he says. Catra bristles at the audacity of him completely ignoring her obvious threat.

“Get out, arrow boy,” she says.

“I just want to talk.”

“I don’t.”

“Catra.”

 _“Bow._ I’m serious. _”_

He grins. Catra freezes.

Fuck.

“I didn’t—” Catra starts haltingly, pissed at her own mistake, pissed at her own inability to think straight whenever she encounters one of the _others_ like her, throwing her so off-balance when she’s normally so composed, ready to strike at a moment’s notice. She’s out of her depth when it comes to them, although she doesn’t have to admit it to herself for the others to see the truth in it.

“I was afraid I had the wrong person,” Bow teases, smiling, though he has to be sure of who she is. His hand is still between them and he reaches forward now, taking a sure step toward her. So confident that she won’t strike.

He has nothing to fear, Catra supposes. A little pain before the reset, and that’s nothing compared to the things he’s probably seen.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Catra pushes. Bow’s expression flickers, face falling for a moment.

“You don’t have to pretend, you know. We’re happy to have you.”

“You don’t—” Catra growls but puts the blade away, hissing back into place with a quiet ring of metal on leather. “It’s not like that,” she says.

“How?”

At least he didn’t say anything outright against her.

“It’s just not,” she says. Bow frowns again, dropping his hand back into his pocket.

“Okay,” he says quietly.

“I just—” Catra sighs heavily. It’s been eight years since she saw Adora. Eight years of doubting herself, of questioning every move. Of wondering if she chose her life because of who she wanted to be or if it was all set up for her, every move in place before she even spoke her first wishes because she was the only one who could truly succeed at it. She doesn’t know if she would have chosen this life without this curse— because that’s what it is, really, to live in this life while others pass on, moving to something just over the horizon for her.

It’s lonely. She hasn’t even lost anyone to time, not yet, but she knows it will be.

For now, there’s still time. That’s what her life has turned into: now, and the soon-to-be. Catra shakes her head, stuffing her hands in her pockets. She’s not at risk, here. The man means well. She allows herself this, a moment of vulnerability in the unforgiving world she was thrown into. _The world you chose,_ she reminds herself, because this life isn’t made up of accidents and coincidences but decisions and consequences. Somewhere along the way, she took a shot in the dark, and ended up here.

“Let me have this,” she says, her voice low. Bow’s face softens. “This is my only time with these people, and I’m not leaving it behind.” Catra straightens, the momentary hurt in her voice gone with her next words. “If we do have all the time in the world, I’ll meet up with you later. After I’m done here, but I’ve got time left. I’ve got business with these people, before they’re gone.”

Bow nods. “A wise decision,” he says. “One I wish I’d made.”

This time, when Bow holds out his hand, Catra shakes.

  
  


_vii._

**4 years later**

Without meaning to, Catra wanders home.

No— it hasn’t been home in a long time. It’s just habit to call it that.

The dirt path is the same, if a little more worn. There’s a bench out front she doesn’t recognize, and the rope swing hanging from the tree has been replaced with a sturdier seat, one she can’t imagine falling off of. Lilies bloom in scraggly patches at the base of the porch, short, bushy stalks of nepeta intermixed with soft petals.

The stairs creak in the same odd pattern, the first two loud and third quiet, the porch deck worn to silence. Windchimes made of bottles and broken glass clink softly in the breeze, carrying smoke and leaves in its breath. Catra steadies herself, and knocks.

Timid footsteps.

A small woman comes to the door, bright amber eyes searching Catra’s. Her hair sits in a scraggly bun on top of her head, a faded version of Catra’s. A loose robe hangs off her frame, cast in crooked shadows by the lantern hanging from her hand. She pushes the door open with one hand, slowly, wide eyes watching her daughter before her.

Her mother, who had urged her to get out, get away, to do anything but get stuck in the rotten seaside town where dreams and old sailors went to die. Who had told her to run and never look back, because this place was a whirlpool and would suck in any who risked reentry.

 _Please, Catra,_ she’d said the night before she left. _Make something where the rest of us can’t. Be remembered,_ she’d pleaded.

“Mom,” Catra says. It’s a relief, a breath of certainty in a world she can no longer trust. She steps forward, trying not to fall apart and knowing it’s the only place she’s safe to do so. The woman raises her hand, casting candlelight into Catra’s eyes. She squints but doesn’t look away, letting her mom recognize her, pair her with the woman she thought she’d lost so long ago. For a moment, tears rise in her eyes and her breath catches. For a moment, she almost reaches for Catra.

The moment falls between them. The woman lets it go, kicks it beneath the welcome mat and buries it behind her.

“What are you?” she asks. Her voice is old and quiet, strong and fierce. It holds no room for doubt. It holds no recognition. Relief turns to ice in Catra’s blood, painful shards tearing her apart from the inside.

“It’s me, Mom,” Catra says. Tears slip down her cheeks. Her hands shake and she is not ashamed, only afraid. “It’s me,” she repeats. “Catra. Catalina, your daughter—”

Her mother sets the lantern on it’s hook by the door and flicks out a knife between them, one Catra has seen her use ruthlessly too many times to count. On threats, on potential allies, on anyone who came too near to her family.

“You are not my daughter.”

“Mom,” Catra begs. “Please.”

“My daughter drowned at sea,” the woman proclaims. She looks down her nose at Catra, eyes hardening. “What are you? A spirit? A demon?” Despite herself, she steps forward, curiosity burning in those familiar eyes.

“It’s _me.”_ Catra’s voice breaks and she can feel herself falling, that burning ache in the back of her throat, pain in her stomach, everything overflowing and painful and _too much._ Her mother’s eyes sweep over her. It’s the same critical gaze Catra feared when she was small, and adopted herself years later. It hasn’t been turned on Catra since she was small and unknowing. She reaches forward and her mother bats her hand away, grabbing her jaw in one hand to hold her still the way a mother would grab her child’s ear to reprimand them, but this isn’t familiar, cold and calculating and the last memory Catra will ever have of her. Catra freezes, aches at the familiar touch turned harsh.

“My daughter died at sea,” she repeats, and Catra can’t tell her she’s right. Her voice wavers, giving way to despair, though her hand remains steady. _“You_ are nothing but a wretched creature sent in her place to deceive me. I’ll have nothing to do with you.”

“Please,” she whispers, voice breaking. She can’t argue against her mother’s words; they’re true in their own right. Still, she fights, because the only other option is to give in and Catra cannot give up her last shred of hope.

“Mom, listen to me—”

Faster than Catra can blink, her mother raises her hand and slaps her across the face, hard enough for Catra to see stars. She stumbles back, dizzy and nearly falling with the force of the blow. There’s another _crack_ and Catra expects the delayed pain of another blow, but nothing comes. She straightens, one hand cupping her cheek. The porch is dark, door shut and bolted, lamplight fading behind the rickety wooden door.

Catra turns away, tears burning on her skin, pain cutting a deep knife into her wrists, her heart, her soul. She turns from the darkened house where her mother waits for too many children to come home. Untethered, now, and Catra’s tears are fear, loneliness, anger, and relief.

 _No more goodbyes,_ she tells herself. _No more leaving._ Catra steps away from the little house with the small woman and smaller memories, and goes to find the others.

**Author's Note:**

> wtf. you made it. hi???? my bad on this being so dramatic lmao, i was trying to see if i liked this style and jury's still out. anyway i have poured an unholy amount of time into this and i accidentally 1. planned it more thoroughly than my current original work lmao 2. just straight up started treating it like an original work 3. have already cried about a scene i havent even written yet
> 
> id like to apologize for rosa's fight scene(s). i wrote the first half in october and the second half twenty minutes ago and did **not** look at it again (jk but also kinda not 😭). also, i'm on someone else's wifi rn and can't google how to make explosives with 18th cent materials (that scene is set in 1702 btw) so i had to go w what seemed logical
> 
> whew. ok. that was so much and im gonna go hide but if you got all the way to the end, leave a comment? :) thanks for reading!
> 
> i'm on [twitter](https://twitter.com/xandrillia) as well if u ever want to chat !


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